Cook Cook Blues
by BunnyAcePants
Summary: One-shot. A woman contemplates an old obsession and then looks at the facts. Or, the difference between cats and dogs.


The BeBop was moving, and she couldn't stop it. The floor was cold on her thighs and she wondered disjointedly if she had put too many of her cards on the table by walking around in tight little shorts and too little top. _She _had worn neck-to-ankle coverage, and _he _had liked that just fine.

Faye was fine with forgetting the past. She couldn't, however, forget the present.

His body probably hadn't even been cremated yet. If it had, the ashes were still hot.

After a while she stood, legs tingling as they woke to painful reality, but doing their job in conveying her past the couch _he _lounged on and into "her" room, where she could shut out the rest of the world and just not think.

The rest of the world. That was just about Jet. Faye let out a sigh, pursing her little red lips as if she were exhaling around a bad cigarette. He hadn't taken it too hard – something about a white cat seemed to give him some sense of inner peace. Faye supposed he had anticipated this end for a long time. She, though, was only beginning to come to terms with it all.

Faye flopped over onto her stomach, head pillowed on the crook of her right arms as she flexed her left fingers, the ache in her breast being matched pang for pang right down to her nails. Sorrow was like a heart attack; it spread down the left arm from the aorta and paralyzed its victim, killing it slowly from the inside out.

What was her fascination with him, anyway? He hadn't given her anything concrete that wasn't a harsh word or a smug life philosophy. A glance or two in her direction, a silent smile…it was just enough to sustain an obsession, sustain a hope that maybe she could make him forget _her _and make him live in the present. After all, he was a man. Faye knew men, and knew that they never stayed around one woman for long.

At least, they never stayed around Faye for long.

A tap at the door confirmed the impossibility of peace when there were only two people on a starship. Faye just barely stopped herself from asking who it was.

"What do you want, Jet?"

"Dinner's ready."

"If it's bell peppers and beef I'll choke you with your own chopsticks." Faye's attempt at flippancy rang harsh and hollow in her ears. She cringed at the hoarse break in her voice.

"It's eggs and oysters. I wanted seafood, and figured we'd had enough of lobster."

Faye remained silent for a moment, knowing she needed to eat something and yet not wanting the company of a man who wasn't _him, _but was present in almost every memory of the Godforsaken fuckwit. She wondered how long it would be until Jet left the corridor and went to eat his food before it congealed into a cold, wobbly mass. Mentally, she counted the minutes. When she reached twenty, she figured it was safe to emerge. Faye rose and walked through the door.

Jet was standing there, arms folded over his chest, face patient. Faye's eyes dropped to his left arm, a queer feeling closing around her heart.

For the first time since she had met him, it was whole. Whole, pristine, and gleaming with the sort of masculine vitality that a real man's arm, a real _arm_ could.

"I figured you'd be stubborn, so I put dinner on just before I came to get you. Come on, it'll burn in a moment. You're right on time."

Faye grit her teeth, but followed the large man, eyes straying guiltily toward the fresh, muscular limb as it swung two and fro with all the ease of one he had possessed since birth. The veins pulsed gently, drawing faint tracks across his forearm and bicep, pushed to the surface of the skin by the strong fibers underneath.

"The eggs are boiled…I hope you don't mind. Scrambled and over easy take more attention, and eggs appreciate attention even less than you do."

Faye snorted, mildly affronted, but all in all feeling she rather deserved the jibe. They entered the main room, and she regarded the candles and tablecloth set out with one raised eyebrow. Jet shrugged.

"I figured nice things don't just happen – we have to exert some effort to make them that way. What's wrong with a nice dinner once in a while? I'm thinking about clearing out the ship a little, fixing some things up. No reason for me not to treat the BeBop like home. Not like I'll settle down anywhere else," he muttered gruffly.

Faye felt a twinge of sympathy for the man. Perhaps he was taking the loss harder than she thought. After all, Alisa had left him for another man, and Spike – she cringed at the subconscious admission of the name – had left him for a woman, or pride, or whatever compelled him to get himself cleaved in half in a city that shouldn't have meant anything to him anymore. Perhaps that was why Jet had finally gotten his arm fixed at last – all links to the past were dead, so why tarry there at all? He didn't need any reminders anymore.

_Spring cleaning, _Faye thought bitterly, sitting down at the place set for her. If it were her, she would have gladly kept the metal arm. She was feeling enough as it was, and she would welcome an arm that wouldn't be a painful reminder of the heart's loss. Jet took the old tin covers off their plates, and they both began to eat silently, neither hungry but both craving some sort of animalistic comfort, something to fill up the empty spaces inside of them, though their target was several inches above the stomach.

A tense silence settled over the two, and Faye resorted to pushing the meal around her plate, picking out the individual ingredients in an attempt to squash all thoughts out of her mind. The oysters stared at her contentedly, perhaps happier than their bi-valve mollusk cousins as they lounged in the lightly spiced rice. Faye detected the smell of ginger and saffron, two warming smells that had no place in the heart of the cold ship. The eggs were rather soft, perhaps half-boiled at best, seeming to mock the runny eyes of their consumers. Faye sighed.

Something warm and comfortingly heavy covered her right hand. A spark shot up the one arm and bypassed her heart en route to the pit of her stomach, momentarily quelling the torment. Her head shot up and she looked straight into a face devoid of emotion and eyes running amok with it.

It was a face that had watched her silently one moment and broken into laughter in the next, a face that was always there, open and honest. It belonged to the man that had always been hanging around the edges, the man that had dragged her back after every desertion.

She had heard him say that he used to be called the Black Dog – once he bit, he'd never let go. And he hadn't. He hadn't let her go, even though she had used him and stolen from him and snapped at him more times than she could remember. Jet was the one constant in her life, much, much different from the ungrateful stray tomcat that had left her for a corpse as cold and unfeeling as he.

Jet's left arm grasped her hand of its own volition, not making any demands, not declaring any ultimatums, just remaining there and giving her the same sort of steadfast comfort she had always associated with him and the BeBop. Good, honest comfort.

"What next, Jet?" Faye asked, quietly. "What now, now that we're the only ones left?"

Jet sighed, chafing her hand between his fingers, drinking in the skin-on-skin contact as if it were water on a parched desert plain.

"God damn it, Faye," he murmured. "For once in your life, can't you just shut up and see me without bringing anyone else into it?"

Faye furrowed her brows, trying to make sense of the man's answer. "You're babbling, you crazy bastard."

The man across from her quirked first an eyebrow, and then a smile.

"Just eat your aphrodisiacs, Faye, and let me seduce you already."


End file.
